You might have shared the same frustrations with me when seeing new apps coming up on Android or iOS that are exactly what you wanted to do, but didn’t or never have time to make it real. It’s a bitter-sweet kind of mixed feeling; I’m happy that what I wanted comes true (done by others, though) and…. I am a user, but on the other hand, in my head it keeps saying “That should have been me!”.

So today I suck it up, forget the regrets, and get started. There are tons of good resources on Android and iOS app development on the Internet. Among them I found a few that are extremely good, and I just thought they might be useful for others as well, so let me share them with you.

Building mobile applications — Computer Science CS-76 (provided by Harvard)
URL: [url] You can find good quality course videos and all the materials there.
Previous years archives are also available in iTune.

Creative Programming for Digital Media & Mobile Apps
This course is not available yet, but just by looking at the syllabus I think the content is essential, yet pretty unique.
The course is coming soon on Coursera.

Today I just found an interesting website BigML, and it seems to offer a playground for people, especially ML researchers, to experiment standard machine learning techniques on your data set or even on your business.

In a sense, MapReduce framework is very similar to message-passing algorithm in graphical models where the Map and Reduce are comparable to building (tree) structure and marginalization of the messages respectively. So, I think MapReduce can make an inference plausible for large-scale graphical models.